Rapid Language Learning

KonstantinRyabitsev

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November, 2004

Abstract

A geek is faced with a task of quickly learning French to pass
a standardized test. He manages to accomplish it in 10 months,
largely in his spare time, and using easily-accessible
technology together with cheap or free resources.

Introduction

I stretch the truth a little when I say that I managed to learn
French in just 10 months, but this is an election year, so I
don't feel quite as bad about exaggerating in order to put my
achievements in a more appealing light. Of course, it takes
years of effort and constant practice to learn a foreign
language—I do not think even Mensa™ members can
claim to be able to learn an unknown language in just one year,
and those of them who can, indeed, accomplish such a feat are
kept deep underground for brain experiments anyway.

No, what I'm talking about here is learning enough French to
pass a standardized test, more specifically TEF, or Test d'Evaluation de
Français. The reasons why I needed to pass
this test are quite simple—I am currently in the process
of immigrating to Canada, and the knowledge of both of their
official languages gives the applicant a significant boost on
the immigration score. I already knew enough English for it not
to be a problem, but I had only studied French for one semester
in High School, more than 12 years ago, and could only remember
small bits and pieces of what I had learned, mostly the general
pronunciation rules, and even some of those incorrectly.

So, realizing that knowing enough French to get decent scores on
TEF could have had life-altering effects in my case, I have
decided to set out on a quest to learn as much French as I could
in one year. I started in August, 2003, and I have taken my exam
in May of 2004, getting enough points to qualify as
"advanced" in most areas. This little write-up is a
description of my experiences and methods I have
used—perhaps they will be useful to someone else with a
similar goal in mind.

My background

I should give a fair warning: I believe I have certain
predispositions for rapidly learning a foreign
language. English is already my second—I have grown up
speaking Russian, and I went to a specialized English school
where my poor brain was subjected to inhumane atrocities such
as having to learn Oh where, oh where did my puppy
go? and then perform it in public.

I have been learning English ever since I was about 8 years
old, though with varying success—I used to be a very
mediocre student most of my childhood, but when I turned about
15 there was enough inflow of English media into
then-dissolving USSR to put me at the top of my class by the
time I graduated High School. I believe it was the immersion
into the English-speaking environment that helped me most,
next to the realization that knowing how to speak a foreign
language could be very advantageous in my future life.

I also have a very good memory. Though far from being
photographic, it is nonetheless "pretty damn good." When I was
young, I used to drive my older brother mad by reciting the
poems back to him after only having heard them repeated a few
times—and I'm talking things like Mayakovski's
An Ode to the Soviet Passport, not some
"on a boat with a goat" stuff. What took my brother a lot of
effort to learn came nearly naturally to me, which is actually
a rather dangerous situation when your brother is 7 years your
elder. But even though learning a foreign language requires a
lot of memorization, I believe that even people with
non-stellar abilities when it comes to remembering foreign
words can fare well when using certain memorization methods.

Finally, I am a programmer by day, and in the past 10 years I
have had to learn about 15 different programming languages,
both simple and complex, so it is probably fair to say that I
have developed a set of skills that lets me assemble and
disassemble the logical structure of a language with relative
ease, be it used to communicate between humans, or to give
instructions to a machine.

And, of course, it is useful to remember that I have had a
very strong motivation to learn how to read and speak French,
since it was a very important part of my Canadian Immigration
plan. In your study of a foreign language the motivation will
probably be the first requirement. If you have no motivation
or desire to learn how to speak something other than your
native tongue, you will probably not succeed. Keeping in mind
the outcome of the recent presidential elections, who
knows—maybe immigrating to Canada or some other
francophone country may suddenly be on your radar as well. :)

Question of time

I have a day job. All of what I have achieved in one year was
done mostly on nights and weekends, plus during my 3-week trip
to visit my parents in Russia, when I spent many evenings
reading a book and putting plenty of thumb-grease on my French
dictionary. Furthermore, I spent a lot of time slacking during
my first half year, which I believe was actually
beneficial. What I am trying to say—it is not necessary
to cancel your cable and to break up with your girlfriend if
you want to rapidly learn a language. In fact, varying
activities will help greatly in your memorization, so allow
for some R&R. You will certainly dedicate plenty of effort
to this task, but if at any time you start feeling like you
are burning out, it's time to give it a little slack and go do
something else. After all, forgetting what you have learned is
one of the required steps in learning, though more on that at
a later point.

Other languages

I will talk about how I learned French after already knowing
English. In fact, knowing English was a very important asset
in this endeavor, since these two languages are similar enough
to allow me to take a lot the things I have previously had to
learn about English and to re-apply them to French with mostly
slight modifications. However, I believe my experience might
be equally useful to someone who is learning Spanish,
Portuguese, or other Romance language, as they are very
similar to French with comparatively small differences in the
grammatic and syntactic structure. Learning non-Romance
languages will probably require a different approach, but you
may still find this document useful.

And above all, this is not a textbook: this is a small
treatise on methods. This document alone will not teach you
French in one year, but it will hopefully give you a few
pointers on how to achieve that goal using the things I have
found useful for myself.

The beginning

I believe I managed to pick one of the best ways to learn a
language from the very beginning, though this was largely a
fluke of my own over-confidence. Being a little Harry Potter
crazy, I ordered the French version of the third book from
amazon.fr,
thinking that I would be able to quickly learn the basics of the
language by using the English original as a reference.

That didn't work quite as I had hoped. The reason why this
didn't work was largely because reading free text requires some
basic knowledge of the language's grammatical and syntactic
structure in order to be able to proceed down that path, if only
because a lot of dictionaries do not provide references for
conjugated verbs. The situation is aggravated by the fact that
some of the more common French verbs have more shapes than your
standard Rorchach test, some having nothing to do with its form
in the infinitive. Particular offenders are
être and avoir, who,
to give an example, change to fut and
eut respectively in Passé
Simple, the verbal tense you are particularly likely
to meet in the literary form of written French.

So, realizing that I was going nowhere fast, I have put aside my
copy of Le Prisonnier d'Azkaban, and
picked up Schaum's Outline of French
Grammar, which I have found indispensable in
my studies of French. Having covered the first few chapters,
which dealt with the absolute basics of the language, such as
pronouns, adjectives, and the more common cases of verbal
conjugation—Passé Composé, Passé Simple,
Imparfait, Futur Indicatif, and Le
Conditional—I was able to return to
meticulously going through the chapters of the book, this time
with far more success.

Now, when I say that I went through
Schaum's, I must mention that I actually
only skimmed the explanations, without doing any of the
exercises. At that point I was really only interested in knowing
how to decipher the language, while most study guides will
concentrate immediately on both how to consume, and on how to
produce, which is a task far more complicated than simple
reading. I don't think it's a very helpful strategy, as the
complexities will drive you completely insane and you will
quickly become frustrated with how many things you have to learn
in order to be able to correctly synthesize a simple sentence in
a foreign language. I suggest you do like me and first learn how
to understand written language, leaving the frustrating parts
for later. At least that's what worked for me—I was able
to read the French translation of Harry Potter and
the Prisoner of Azkabanafter only 4 months of
efforts, and after that, during my 3-week vacation
visiting my parents in Russia, I was able to swallow all 1400
pages of Le Comte de Monte-Cristo,
dedicating to this monumental task the fabled long Russian
winter evenings (1-2).

Learning how to read

So, the first steps you will need to accomplish when learning
how to read French is to familiarize yourself with the very
basics of the French grammatic structure. Don't bother
memorizing which ending goes with which verbal
tense—your goal is to build your language recognition
skills and your vocabulary. Pick a book that you already know
well, preferably a kids' book written in a language that isn't
too complex, and have the English version by your side. I have
picked Harry Potter, and I believe that it is an excellent
choice for anyone. It's fun to read, and you have probably
read it anyway—no need to pretend that you haven't.
Don't pick an advanced text. It is important to feel like
you're making progress, and a complicated text will just
frustrate you. Trust me, even with a kids' book you will
already have enough difficulties, so no need to complicate
things by trying to tackle Les Misérables
from the get-go. Above all, stay away from texts you will find
on the Internets, unless it's a transcript of a valid literary
work. Most Internet-posting French people can't spell even if
their life depended on it, and at this point it is very
important for you to remember the word shapes visually: it
won't do you any good if you remember them wrongly.

Your initial progress will be very slow, and the following two
online resources will come in very handy: Google language
tools, and wordreference.com
French dictionary (though they have stopped providing
transcriptions since I last actively used them, which is a
pity). While all automatic computer translations suck if you
need to translate genuine foreign text into something
resembling sane English, this flaw will actually work to your
advantage when learning to read French (unless Google ends up
being just plain
wrong). Whenever you come across a sentence of which
you are unable to make heads or tails, typing it in and
getting a Googlified translation will give you a very crude
word-for-word representation of the phrase in English. With
that, you should be able to figure out what each word in the
original sentence does and how they all align together in
order to form the phrase in question, which in turn trains
your brain to learn and recognize this structure in the
future. You can also use wordreference.com French dictionary
to look up words, if only because they will actually try to
guess what it is that you were trying to look up, and they
even have most weird conjugation forms pointing back to the
verbs in their infinitive. This is useful for such verbal
freaks like su and
pu, whose relationship to
savoir and pouvoir
is not immediately obvious. Do not hover too long over phrases
you cannot grok, though. Try your best and then move along.

I will stress again that it is not important at this point to
remember which tense the verbs are actually in. If the text
you are reading in French is familiar to you, it is enough to
know that pu, peux, pouvait, pourrait, puisse,
etc are all the same word which means "to be able
to," and your brain will manage to figure out the rest relying
mostly on your existing memory of the transpiring events and
the contextual information surrounding the verb in
question. After a little while you will be able to figure out
on your own that peux, peut, peuvent, puisse, etc
are all in some form of the present tense,
pouvais, pouvaient, pu, pue, etc are all
in some form of a past tense (of which there are way too
many), and the rest are some form of future or
conditional. That is enough to know what is going on to read
both familiar and new texts. Most human languages are
semantically overloaded.

According to my journal, I was able to read 2-3
pages an hour after a few weeks of meticulously
hitting Google, Wordreference, and the English version of the
book, but eventually it stopped resembling the work of an
archaeologist who has to look up every pictogram of the
writing, and became more like a puzzle where you have lots and
lots of unknowns, but you have the general idea of the rules
involved. At that point, when I came across an unknown word, I
was able to figure out its neutral form, which was easy enough
to look up in a dictionary. If it was a tricky one, well, then
I used Google to aid me with finding out the infinitive, from
where the usual methods took over.

At that point most of your effort will go into word
memorization. People usually claim that this is the most
difficult part about learning a language. They lie. Learning
words is actually quite simple, since the difficult part is
figuring out the semantic rules that govern the
transformations that each word undergoes when forming a
sentence, and its relationship with the surrounding linguistic
structures. The system I used to train my vocabulary was old
as dirt, but it works—flip cards.

You take a set of blank cards (they sell those in most
bookstores, but you can make your own with a sheet of notebook
paper, some folding, a few operations with a pen-knife, and
some Elmer's glue on one side to make it work like a simple
makeshift "book"), you write the word on one side, and the
translation on the other. The same applies to phrases. Since
all French nouns have "gender" that oftentimes doesn't
correspond in any way to the word itself (why is "a beard"
female, while "a breast" male?), you will have to learn the
gender of most nouns as you go. Suck it up. While it's true
that at this point you are concentrating on reading and not on
writing, it will help you a lot further down the road if you
start remembering noun genders right from the start. After a
little while you will get a "hang" of whether a noun sounds
like a masculine or feminine, but don't rely on that too much,
unless it's a "tion." You will be frequently unpleasantly
surprised.

Pronunciation is easy

Before you get into flip-cards, though, dedicate one evening
to learning the general pronunciation guidelines. Don't worry,
covering the basics will not take much time at
all—French is surprisingly consistent about its
pronunciation rules, as opposed to English, where such phrases
as "the door was made of lead to keep the wind from winding up
in the room" are actually impossible to read out loud without
knowing the meaning of many of its words first. With French,
it's enough to know the basic rules to be able to tackle even
such monstrosities as "bourgeoisie,"
"mademoiselle," and
"fauteuil." Still, there are exceptions,
mostly short common words ending in consonants that by all
rules should be omitted, like "tous," so
keep a dictionary handy, and if you don't yet know the system
used by linguists to represent sounds—learn it. The
correct pronunciation is usually given in the dictionary next
to each word in thin square brackets.

The difficult part about French pronunciation is the effect
called "liaison," which occurs when the consonant of the last
word is succeeded by a vowel or a silent "h" of the next, in
which case the usually-omitted consonant will be actually
sounded, though slightly modified. This effect is responsible
for "vous" (pronounced "voo") and
"êtes" (pronounced "ette") becoming
"voozette" when they are together in that order. However,
don't sweat liaison too much—it will come naturally to
you later on when you get into the speaking
exercises. Besides, it is not integral to being able to
successfully communicate—Francophones will have no
trouble understanding you even if you omit all joining z's and
t's. You'll tackle those later, largely unconsciously.

Oh, and "ent's" just suck. I mean the
verbal endings for third person plural, which look like an
"ent," act like an "ent," but aren't pronounced, unless in
liaison, and even then only the "t" is sounded. Next time you
watch Amélie, look out for
"Les poules couvent souvent au couvent"
in the beginning of the movie and revel in the fact that
millions of poor francophone children have to go through this
crap, too. If you read your book out loud, which is not such a
bad idea, pay attention to the "ents," and make sure that you
only pronounce those that aren't verbal endings. If it's a
verb, and it ends with an "ent," it's silent, and every time
you say it, god kills a kitten.

So, once you have the basics of pronunciation down, take a
flip-card, and write the French word on one side like so:
"la barbe" or "le
sein," then flip it over and write the English
translation on the other side: "beard" and "breast." I have
found that using "le" and
"la" was more memorable for me than using
"un" and "une" for
whatever reason, except for nouns beginning with a vowel. Your
case may be different. If the word has uncommon pronunciation
rules, write its transcription on the French side as well, to
help you remember. When you have about 30 of these cards, make
a stack. Your goal is to learn each of these words, but do it
in a smart and cunning manner that would require fewer
repetitions than most people actually believe is necessary.

Flip-card strategery

The main trick is knowing how our memory works, and knowing
that forgetting is just as important as learning, as absurd as
that statement sounds. First of all, you will need to tie the
word you are trying to learn into its meaning by any means
possible, and you can do so by using the method of making
vivid far-fetched associations. This is best illustrated with
a few examples. Let's take our beard—"la
barbe"—and go with it. You will need to
remember that it's feminine, and that it means "a beard." Now,
recall the scene from Coming to America
with Eddie Murphy, with its colorful chatty barber, played by
Mr. Murphy himself. Now, imagine a large bearded woman
entering that barber shop, asking for a trim, and how everyone
would react to that situation. Your goal is to make this
mental scene as memorable as possible—unique bizarre
situations work best for the purpose of semantic associations.

Often, this will not be quite as easy as "a barber" and
"la barbe," and I will be the first to
admit that I have not been able to use this technique to
remember all words that I have come across. However, with a
bit of effort, you will be able to use it to remember most of
your vocabulary.

Let's try with a more difficult
one—"trapu" which means "stout, of
short height." I actually used a Russian word to remember this
one, imagining a short and stout member of our computing team
running up and down an aircraft emergency landing slide
(called in Russian a "trap") in a state
of intense agitation (the person, not the slide). In English,
a "trap" means something else, but it's still a word, so you
can feel free to imagine the same short stout member of our
computing team as the admiral of the rebels in Star
Wars, shouting "it's a trap!" However, since you
are unlikely to be familiar with our computing team, you can
feel free to come up with your own short, stout, and agitated
replacements to better suit your purposes.

Let's take a tough
one—"apprivoiser" which means "to
tame, to domesticate." Nothing comes immediately to mind, so
feel free to reach out into the bizarre. I would break it up
into "apron" and "visor," and since it has to do with taming,
I would imagine a large undomesticated animal, like a baboon,
being ordered around by a circus trainer wearing an apron and
a visor. Or, alternatively, a more catching scene would be a
baboon in an apron throwing poop at that trainer, who has to
wear one of those plastic visors so it doesn't get into his
face. Your goal is to actually make the association
far-fetched, bizarre, and vivid, since these are far more
likely to stick in your head for longer than the thirty
minutes after you put down your flip-cards. Feel free to be
crude and inappropriate, if that helps you. The way I actually
managed to remember that "erreur" is
feminine, while "problème" is masculine
was by pretending that "women make mistakes, which just
creates problems for us men." Before you start throwing poop
at me for being sexist, I must say that I fully agree with
you, and that I actually don't think that way, but the goal
here is to remember the vocabulary, and not to be PC. My
"keepsake" did its trick, largely because it was a scandalous
thought in itself. In creating your association, feel free to
break away from the ordinary. It will only help.

With each card, read the word out loud (or out quiet—the
important part is actually moving the parts of your speech
apparatus to create the muscle memory), with any and all
qualifiers attached to it, such as "la"
or "le," and create a vivid mental
association that would help you to tie this word to its
meaning. Don't worry, the associations won't get in the way
later on—think of them as training wheels on a bike:
while they are annoying and uncool, they teach you how to keep
your balance, so that eventually you are able to go downhill
and fall into mud on your very own. Associations are just a
first-step glue to make it stick to your brain—when you
use these words later on in your speech, the process used to
recall them will not involve the associations you create, so
they will just fade away. Except the baboon—he'll remain
with you forever.

I said: forget it!

Go over your stack of cards until you remember each one of
them without having to flip-flop over to the "cheater side."
Now put them down and try to forget everything that you have
learned. No, I'm serious—put those things away until the
next day and do not think any more about the words and phrases
which you have just spent time memorizing. The best way to
remember something is to forget and relearn it several times
over. Most language-learning resources will suggest going over
the flip-cards as often as possible, whenever you have a
minute, but that actually defeats the purpose. When about 24
hours have passed and you have forgotten everything that you
have learned from that stack, pick it up again, and go through
the cards one after another. If you can't remember any of
them, it's actually a good thing. Look at the French version,
try to remember its English translation by attempting to
recreate your associative keepsakes. Don't over-exert
yourself, though, and if you can't remember it after a few
seconds of trying, just flip the damn thing over, read the
translation, smack yourself on the forehead, recall and renew
the association you have used to remember the word, and move
over to the next one. Go over them several times until you can
recall what each word means without peeking at the English
side, and then put that stack away for about 3 days.

As far as I can tell, the best is to repeat what you have
learned at these intervals: after 1 day, after 3 days, after 1
week, after 2 weeks, and then again after 2 more weeks, and by
this I mean wait one day, relearn, wait three days, relearn,
wait a week, relearn, etc.—the intervals start from the
last time you touched the cards, not from the initial
memorization. This works with any sort of drilling: I used the
same technique when doing written exercises with same
results—I was usually able to remember whatever it was I
was trying to learn after re-doing the exercise several times
over, observing the timing rules I've outlined above. I
understand that this is the method that Pimsleur uses, too,
but I've never actually used any of their products, so I can
only judge from the blurbs on the backs of their cassette-tape
audiobooks I looked at while in Barnes and Noble.

The intervals are not set in stone, and if you manage to miss
a day or two, particulary during the latter repeats, it won't
be the end of the world. Just pick it up a couple of days later
and don't worry about it too much. I think the crucial are the
first three intervals, though I only have my experience and
intuition to back me up.

It will also help, especially in the early stages of your
reading, to go back to the pages you have already read, just
to refresh the phraseology and to see the vocabulary you are
learning in its natural habitat. Something you shouldn't do,
though, is write the translations in the text above the words,
or in fact anywhere on the page. You will just cheat yourself
this way, since you will make no mental effort to recall the
meaning of the word when going over it again, and the
necessary mental connections will therefore remain unengaged.

Then what?

According to my journal, I was able to start reading rapidly
by November,
which, having started in August, puts me at about 4 months of
effort. Not bad, especially considering that I wasn't trying
particularly hard at the time. That was not to start until
January, when I had realized that even though I have really
progressed in my reading skills, I was still a near-complete
zero when it came to understanding spoken French, or aligning
two words together in a sane manner to make a
sentence. However, now that you have started reading, this is
something that you should never stop doing, if only a few
pages each day, taking on more and more difficult books to
enrich your vocabulary. Whenever you pick up a new book,
especially if it's by a different author, you will notice a
significant increase in the amount of unknown words you
encounter, since each writer has their own favorite lexicon
they prefer to use. During the first few chapters you will be
putting plenty of mileage on your dictionary, but eventually
this should drop off to normal levels as you familiarize
yourself with that particular author's style.

At this point you should start spending a little more time
with phrases you cannot figure out. What has helped me, and
what will undoubtedly help you, is to subscribe to a
French-learning mailing list, but be careful to choose the one
where it is allowed to use English to ask your questions. One
of the first mistakes I made was to ask a question about a
phrase I had troubles with in a French-language newsgroup, and
though people have been polite and helpful answering it, they
also made it pretty clear that next time I should address them
in the proper tongue, or suffer the consequences. In my
studies, I have used French-English
Tutor list on groups.yahoo.com, and I would recommend
it to you as well—the traffic is low, and people are
very helpful if you ask good questions.

Keep using those flip-cards, too, but also concentrate more on
phrases and idiomatic expressions, since they will be crucial
to understanding spoken speech. Also, don't throw away the old
card stacks, even if you remember all the words off of them,
as if they had been burned onto your retinas. In the next
section you will start going through them backwards: from
English to French.

Speak now, or forever hold your pee

With reading under the belt, it's time to progress onto the
menial labor. The goal now is to learn how to understand spoken
French, and to learn how to generate some of your own. This will
require decidedly more effort than reading. All three
things—listening, speaking, and writing, can and should be
done at the same time, since at this point it makes no sense to
separate the effort.

Writing French

There is no reason to be in denial over it. As you have most
certainly figured out on your own by now, French grammar is
hard. It will probably be a bit of a solace to you to also
know that it's still easier than Greek, Latin or Russian, but
I doubt you'll find much respite in that little piece of
trivia. What might be an encouraging thought, though, is to
realize that since you're learning French as an adult,
starting from its written version, you are less likely to
trouble with the grammar than most French kids, who have to
learn it after first learning the spoken language. It's a fact
that quite a large number of French themselves have long since
given up on trying to figure out how to write correctly in
their own language, and a lot of times just make up something
as they go, which is why I have advised you to stay away from
things you find on the Internet, especially from IRC channels,
unless there is a grammar-nazi hanging around in the same
chat-room as you (hi, Anvil). :)

What has helped me tremendously was the same
Schaum's Outline of French Grammar
book, though this time I actually started doing all exercises
tediously, still observing the same memorization intervals of
which I have spoken earlier. Make sure that you make no marks
in the book, and come back to redo each exercise, even if you
are confident that you remember it well. Your goal is to train
your visual memory, plus just writing out simple example
sentences will do you lots and lots of good, since it will
help you memorize sentence structures and correct word
sequences.

French has a lot of exceptions that require learning, and I'm
afraid that there is no way around them other than just
sucking it up and learning them. Repeating the exercises
should help tremendously, but it is also helpful to remember
that the absolutely
silly ones nobody observes anyway, unless you are in
the publishing business, for which purpose they keep
bespectacled proofreaders at all French newspapers and
printing houses. They are likely to be the only ones to catch
that there should be a double-dot on top of the "e" in
"une voix aiguë," and that subjunctive
mood only applies to phrases with "avant
que" and not "après que."

Also, if at any time the description says "only used in
literary French," just skip that part entirely if you are
pressed for time. It's nice and all that there are verbal
tenses which are only used in writing, such as Passé
Simple and its subjunctive freak friends, but
seeing as you are not likely to ever write a single sentence
in it, it's not worth spending any time over. That is, of
course, unless you become a prolific French writer, but in
that case I would sincerely hope that you wouldn't still be
relying on Schaum's Outline of French
Grammar as your sole source of grammatic
knowledge.

The goodness of long commutes

I live a few miles away from work, and it usually takes me
about an hour to get there in the morning, and the same amount
of time to get back in the evening, since I commute on
foot. This habit of mine gave me 2 perfect hours each weekday
to devote to listening and speaking exercises, and this is
something you will also need to find in your day. It's not the
goal of this document to extol the virtues of walking on a
daily basis, but I'll do it anyway, since it's an excellent
way to spend your time, combining something useful with
something healthy. If you have long car commutes, you can do
these exercises in the car as well, but your concentration
will suffer, since you will actually need to arrive at your
destination in one piece and not kill anyone along the
way. Seeing as language exercises require quite a bit of
intensive mental work, I'm not sure it's a safe bet. Perhaps
you can do them while walking in your neighborhood park after
work, or you may just allot for this purpose that special time
of your day usually spent swinging in the hammock sipping
beer. Whatever you do, you will need that hour-a-day for your
listening and speaking exercises, so you will need to find a
way to squeeze it in.

I've tried several audio products, but the vast majority of
them is greatly lacking when it comes to actually learning the
language and not memorizing a few broken phrases for your next
vacation. However, after making several disappointing
purchases, I managed to stumble across Barron's
Mastering French Level 1 and it's been
wonderful, even if somewhat lacking in sound quality. It's a
little on the expensive side, especially when bought at a
retail store without the wonderful amazon discounts, but I've
not yet come across an audio product that would be as
effective as this one.

To put it simply, this is a set of repetitive drills, and at
first it may seem like a pretty useless way of trying to learn
French, but teaching the language basics is not the purpose of
that tool anyway. It sets out to do two things—tune your
listening skills to understand spoken French, and teach your
speech apparatus to produce the sound sequences needed to
speak this language, and it's no small task, considering that
the phonetic pallette of French is significantly different
from that of English.

If you do buy this wonderful product, I suggest that you read
the booklet before actually listening to each lesson,
otherwise you will be pretty lost, as things progress
quickly. It is also beneficial if you do the exercises
following the same memorization intervals that I have outlined
earlier, but as each unit takes about an hour to complete, you
may or may not be able to stick to the routine. In any case,
don't fret too much. The memorization schedule is approximate
anyway, and I expect that you will eventually come up with
intervals that are better suited for you than the ones I
proposed.

There is also Barron's
Mastering French Level 2, but I have not
tried it, since at the time of writing it still only exists as
audio tapes, not CDs. It is my credo not to buy anything I
can't easily rip and back up.

Enter Netflix

Once you are done with Barron's (and it will take you a
while), you can go on to the next stage in training your
audial recognition skills—actually listening to some
live French. At first, I bought an audio version of the same
tried-and-true Harry Potter et le Prisonnier
d'Azkaban, read by Bernard Giraudeau from amazon.fr.
However, although it was very enjoyable, it ultimately isn't
the best thing to do to learn spoken French, and I would
equally recommend staying away from all other French
audiobooks (at least as long as the purpose is to learn the
language), since they tend to be low on dialog and rich on
Passé Simple. Books sound pretty and
captivating when read out loud, but rather useless for
learning how to speak French, since nobody other than huge
snobs ever use literary tenses in conversation.

Then, entirely by accident, I stumbled across a
set of Joss Whedon's Firefly DVDs, and
noticed that they had a French soundtrack. After watching them
first in English, then in French, I realized that I may have
found a very useful resource for learning conversational
French, which had an added benefit of not being mind-numbingly
dull. With each DVD, after watching an episode first in
English, then in French, I would rip the French soundtrack
(with transcode),
and copy it onto my portable player. Then, during my daily
commutes, I would listen to it over and over again, almost how
kids ask to be read the same story night after night after
night (see "Hamster Huey and the Gooey Kablooey!"
and Early Parental Schizophrenia, by Watterson
et al). Believe me,
Serenity never gets old, and unlike
those poor parents, my player never gets exhasperated from
having to play the same thing many times over. The only
trouble with Firefly is knowing where French stops and broken
Chinese starts.

I didn't limit myself to
Firefly—I have a Netflix account, and
they have a very decent selection of French movies. With some
of them I did the same thing—copied the soundtrack onto
my player in order to listen to it during my walks. My
favorites were Le
Château de Ma Mère, Le
Fabuleux Destin d'Amélie Poulain, and
Cyrano
de Bergerac, though the latter mostly
because I'm a sucker for classical literature. As far as
conversational language goes, it's rather useless, unless you
ever plan to spar with a bunch of musketeers on the streets of
Paris, all while speaking in perfectly rhymed 16th century
French. Though, admittedly, it can come in handy if you are
ever presented with a task of having to swoon a particularly
snobbish French girl (hey, you never know!).

So, to recap my recommendations—use soundtracks copied
from video materials to train yourself to recognize spoken
French. At first, I would advise to use things dubbed from
English, since dubbed tracks tend to be clearer than original
French, plus they blend less with background noises, making it
easier to discern the speech. Look on Netflix, find a
TV-series that is one of your favorites, and see if they list
French among the languages available. Try not to go too
Sci-Fi, though, as it's unlikely that knowing how to say
"attempting to reverse the polarity!" in French will ever do
you good on the test or in real life (Klingons
hate French). I'd say try
Friends or
Frasier, or something similar that has
lots of common-day situational dialogs. Then, once you're
comfortable with dubbed material, proceed to native French
movies, to accustom yourself to live spoken language in its
natural habitat.

For dubbed movies, watch it first in English, then in French
with English subtitles, then copy the soundtrack and listen to
it as much as you can, until you turn blue and start throwing
up. I've found that French subtitles, if they are available,
are generally not useful, since they rarely correspond to what
is actually said, and thus are only disorienting. For movies
made in French, watch it first with English subtitles until
you are familiar with the plot, then watch it without
subtitles. When you are confident that you can follow what is
going on, copy the soundtrack and listen to it several times
to familiarize yourself with the verbal constructs. As I have
mentioned, I used transcode to rip the soundtrack, and then
encoded the resulting wavs into oggs. I wrote a very dirty shell
script to accomplish this, but if you live in
Windows-land, you can probably find something that would do it
for you, if you google hard enough.

Other audio materials

There are two other resources that I used to learn spoken
French: songs and talk-radio. Songs I would recommend any
time, especially since finding lyrics on the Internet is
relatively simple. Talk-radio isn't quite as useful, if only
because if you are listening to it live, you will get
hopelessly lost, unless you're doing it late in the game when
your listening skills are already pretty sharp. French radio
hosts tend to speak rapidly, and if you add to that the
distortions that come from studio microphones and especially
from low-bandwidth streaming audio transmissions, this is not
a method of learning that I would recommend to anyone. The
only time I found internet radio useful was when I was learning the Québec
accent, and that was after I was already comfortable
with spoken European French.

However, something that I haven't done, but which could be
useful to those who want to try it, is to find a French
popular music station and rip the shoutcast stream with streamripper.
Once you have enough songs, you can look up the lyrics for
them using Google, and liven up your commutes with something
other than just spoken word. Songs are useful because they are
easy to remember and sing along, which in turn trains your
brain to recognize popular verbal memes. I wish I had thought
of that myself at the time, since I was limited to a
compilation of Joe Dassin's top hits, a CD of Patricia Kaas,
and that song from Enigma that goes "Sade,
dis-moi."

Real People

So, you are nearing the completion of your Schaum's
Outline, you are able to pick up most
French dialog in the movies, even without watching them first
in English, and you French R's are like your French
kisses—long, sloppy, and with plenty of tongue
action. However, when you try to put two words together, you
still stumble and come to a grinding halt even when trying to
put together simplest sentences. That's because no matter how
much time you spend with your player and your written
exercises, there is no substitute for actually speaking the
language in a live face-to-face conversation. For that, of
course, you will need to find some live French people.

The best way to find a French person willing to converse with
you on a variety of subjects is to be a rich, handsome,
Ferrari-driving stud with a chest of drawers and abs of
steel. Stunning looks, expensive clothes, and deep pockets
will guarantee plenty of opportunity to work on your oral
French. Anyone not meeting these parameters, however, will
have to settle for french.meetup.com.
There is a good possibility that you will be able to find a
number of people equally interested in learning French who
live near you, and attending their meetings will help you hook
up with other souls in a similar quandary. Once a month is
definitely not enough to produce any sort of useful
results—you will need to be speaking on a far more
regular basis than that, like several times a week. Using
meetup.com you should be able to find enough people nearby who
would be interested in meeting more often, though be prepared
to offer something in return, like to buy them dinner, or to
help them with their English. I was lucky enough to have
several francophones working with me, who have graciously
agreed to meet for lunch on a regular basis to talk about
things and to tolerate my attempts at broken French,
frequently interrupted by long segues into English.

If you are unable to find anyone living near you who is a
fluent speaker of French and who is also willing to subject
themselves to the torture of hearing you speak, you can always
try teleconferencing using IP telephony. The subject of
teleconferencing frequently shows up on the French-English
Tutor list, to which I subscribe, so there are plenty of
people out there who are into this sort of thing. Your best
option is to find someone interested in learning English who
is looking for someone interested in learning French, so you
can allocate part of your conference to speaking one language,
and part to speaking the other. Watch out for time zones,
though—it's going to be a significant hindrance, next to
the fact that, well, teleconferencing sucks.

Don't limit yourself to just speaking French, though—you
will also need to write it. A lot. Since you have more time to
look up words and check noun genders, you may find writing
easier than speaking, but it can be deceptive, since there are
fewer rules you need to observe when speaking. After all,
parler, parlez, parlé, parlée, parlais,
parlait, and parlaient are all
pronounced the same (by the vast majority of French, though
technically there are differences). If you blog, try blogging
in French. Alternatively, you may find a discussion group that
is willing to tolerate your linguistic gaffes if you have
something insightful or informative to bring to the table. In
the latter case, I suggest you add this to your signature: "If
you see an error in my French, I would appreciate it if you
correct me in a private email," since most people will just
politely cringe and ignore your mistakes. However, it is also
important to remember that people who try to correct you can
also be just
plain wrong themselves, so remember to double-check,
unless it's someone you trust. The more you write, the better
you will be at speaking, too, since the language-creation
process is similar for both activities.

Something that will come in very handily for writing French is
a verb conjugator. If you are using Un*x, there is an excellent one for
Gnome called Verbiste, and if
you are on a Windows box, you can get one from Verbix, or just use their
online conjugator, though it is regularly non-functioning
closer to the end of the month when they run out of bandwidth.

Another neat trick you can use when writing, which is
especially handy when struggling with word order and those
tricky ever-changing prepositions, is to use quoted Google
queries to see which version gets more hits. For example,
let's say that you're unsure whether you should write
"j'ai essayé à faire" or
"j'ai essayé de faire."
Go to google.fr and search for both phrases: you will find out
that using "à" you get only 4
hits, while using "de" you get
over
20 thousand. It becomes quite clear which version is
the correct one.

After the Basics

If you have followed all of the above, you should be somewhere
near the same point where I am right now. It's only been a year
and a few months since I have started to learn French: I can
read the text of any level without much difficulty, still
normally keeping a dictionary handy, and I can express myself in
writing with relative ease. Though I still do make plenty of
errors in my writing, they are usually minor semantic ones, not
grammatic—as in English or any other language, there are
plenty of small things that just don't have a specific rule and
have to be learned the hard way, like prepositions (something is
on TV, in a tree,
at a party, etc). I can understand most
spoken French, unless the speaker has a heavy accent, and I can
talk on most subjects, though I've not had quite as much
practice with that as I would have liked to. But I'm moving to
Montréal soon, anyway, so that is to come.

It is important not to stop at this point, even though you may
want to take a small break and do something else for a while,
especially if you have been doing this to pass a test. If you
stop for too long, you will forget, and all
your hard efforts would be for nothing. I know, it may seem to
you that knowing French is useless asset, unless you plan on
living in Québec or in France, but you never know what life may
throw your way. Besides, refreshing your knowledge from time to
time would be much easier than forgetting it all and having to
start from near-zero if ever you end up in a situation where
knowledge of French is beneficial. Besides, if you know one
Romance language, others are much easier to master.

I cannot really say much about advanced French, since it's
beyond the scope of this document, and since I'm not yet "there"
myself. Judging from my past experience with learning English,
the best thing to do after you are at the intermediate level is
to fully immerse yourself in the language environment, which of
course in case of French is best achieved by moving to a
francophone country. However, if it's not a viable possibility
for you, this modern world we live in still provides lots of
opportunities for linguistic immersion through such things as
readily available French movies, French literature, a multitude
of French radio stations, weblogs, and all other things that
reside in the .fr top-level domain. There are several
fascinating francophone cultures to explore, each with its own
very unique specifics and idiosyncrasies. There are things about
every one of them that simply cannot be translated without
losing a large part of its cultural identity.

One never truly stops learning a language—I've been
studying English for the past 20 years, and still I make
mistakes, and still I come across things of which I have never
heard before. It is said that the mark of a true
savant, at least in terms of linguistic
prowess, is the ability to think in a
foreign language—a very unique and rewarding skill (which
also happens to be highly prised by intelligence agencies
worldwide). I would also add that the ability to speak and think
in a foreign language brings with it an important insight into
other cultural backgrounds. With this understanding comes...

Ah, screw it, who am I kidding. Knowing a foreign language makes
you look like a genius in the eyes of your peers, plus some
chicks dig it when you recite French poetry to them. There, end
of story. Now go learn it!

A. Appendix: A few practical notes

This section provides a few forays into things not directly
related to learning French, but which might be useful to you if
you are immigrating to Canada.

Taking the TEF

If you are learning French in order to take the TEF, be it for
immigration purposes, or to find a job in a francophone
country, at this point you should do quite well. I scored as
"supérieur" in most categories, and
that's only after 10 months of studies. If you are
immigrating, and you marked English as your first language,
remember that you
only have to score as
"intermédiaire" for maximum
possible immigration points.

I would also advise to go ahead and buy the stupid preparation
guide, even though it's a complete ripoff. Try looking
on Ebay first, to see if anyone is selling it, and if you're
unlucky, then buy it from the place where you're planning on
taking the test. Compared to the price of the test, at $95
it's almost a rounding error anyway.

Do the preparatory exercises from the book and from the tapes,
and then take the sample test to gauge your performance. Make
sure that you allow for the fact that you will probably score
lower on the actual test, since you will be nervous, and that
the tape recorder will probably be manufactured in 1970s, with
its reading heads last cleaned when Michael Jackson was still
on his second nose. You will not be able to score the writing
part of the test, but do it anyway and send it off to your
helpful mailing list friends for checking, then judge the
results accordingly.

You shouldn't do badly, at least not if you have been working
assidiously. Even if you don't manage to score high enough to
qualify as "mediocre," it still won't hurt to have a few
additional points. As much as I would like to think that I am
special—and I seriously doubt that I am—if I could
do it, being a slacker extraordinaire, you can do it, too.

Québec

If you have visited Québec, you probably already know that
there is a vast conspiracy among all travel guide publishers,
since they will all tell you with a straight face that French
is the predominant spoken language in that province. However,
if you have been there, you know that it's a bold-faced
lie. Their written language may look like French, but whatever
it is that they use to communicate cannot possibly be the same
language you have studied so hard, since it's impossible to
understand a word of it.

The difference between the "international" flavor of French
and that of its Québec variety is similar to that between the
accent employed by the anchors on BBC and the rural "drawl"
one can encounter in the Southern part of the United
States. When I first came to the US, I found myself in
suburban Atlanta for a few days, and for a while I was
convinced that the guy with whom I was staying had a speech
impediment, since I couldn't understand a word he was
saying. It wasn't until a few days later that I realized that
the disease was apparently of pandemic proportions. Just like
the "Southern talk," the Québec accent has its own
inflections, its own pronunciation rules, and its own names
for many items of every-day use, many borrowed directly from
their anglophone neighbors.

There are no particular methods or strategies for studying
l'accent québécois other than just
letting it "sink" together with other unique things about the
culture of the province of Québec. If you are from the US, be
prepared for such culture shocks as encountering a Chinese
person who speaks English with a French accent, or hearing the
unmistakable sounds of country music, except sung entirely
en français. Listening to a Québec radio
station will help, but only if you are already good at
understanding French as spoken in France. There are also
several decent movies released by local studios, specifically
Québec-Montréal, which is available on DVD
for soundtrack ripping (not on Netflix, though). The movie is
rich in very colorful dialog, which is well-peppered with
unique local expletives, most apparently stemming from various
types of religious architecture.

Even if you aren't interested in immigrating, Québec is
certainly worth a visit because of its very unique place in
the history of North America, and its very distinct surviving
culture; and if you are indeed interested in switching
citizenships, Québec is considered among the more liberal
provinces of Canada. Montréal is a very unique city largely
due to its complete bilingualism, and the rest of Québec is
not called "la Belle Province" for
nothing.